‘Tree of life’ for 2.3 million species released – “A first draft of the ‘tree of life’ for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes — from platypuses to puffballs — has been released. A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life — some containing upwards of 100,000 species — but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life.”

Genome-wide autozygosity is associated with lower general cognitive ability – “We found that increased levels of autozygosity predicted lower general cognitive ability, and estimate a drop of 0.6 s.d. among the offspring of first cousins (P=0.003–0.02 depending on the model). This effect came predominantly from long and rare autozygous tracts, which theory predicts as more likely to be deleterious than short and common tracts.” – discuss. (~_^)

Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment – “This article reports findings regarding the automatic classification of Eurasian languages using techniques from computational biology (such as sequence alignment, phylogenetic inference, and bootstrapping). Main results are that there is solid support for the hypothetical linguistic macrofamilies Eurasiatic and Austro-Tai.”

Does the Welfare State Destroy the Family? Evidence from OECD Member Countries – “[A]n expansion in the welfare state increases the fertility, marriage, and divorce rates with a quantitatively stronger effect on the marriage rate. We conclude that the welfare state supports family formation in the aggregate. Further, we find that the welfare state decouples marriage and fertility, and therefore, alters the organization of the average family.”

Data analysis yields striking maps of human expansion in North American Holocene – “[A] group of paleoclimatologists and anthropologists analyzed data recorded in the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD), which aggregates 35,905 radiocarbon samples from archaeological sites across the North American continent, and was created by Dr. Richard Morlan of the Canadian Museum of History. By applying a kernel density estimation method to the data, the researchers produced the first maps of temporally distinct paleo-demographic trends that correspond well to existing evidence of human expansion across North America in the Holocene.”